If you want to get nit-picky about it, Microsoft stole nothing either...

Stolen Quicktime code was found in Video For Windows, the apparent fix for inferior performance in the previous version. Apple had previously refused to license that code. As mentioned in the other posting, the investment of $150 million in Apple stock, removal of the Apple code, agreement guaranteeing continued updates to office, and Apple continuing to include Explorer for a short time were the major components of the out of court settlement reached.Involving a third party in getting the code doesn't excuse using stolen code.

The earlier issues went beyond the look of an icon. The functional behavior of multiple windows was a major issue that I recall.

"QuickTime for Windows vs QuickTime for Video for WindowsApple brought QuickTime to Windows by simply porting large chunks of the Macintosh's native drawing system. QuickTime performance on Windows was vastly better than Microsoft's Video for Windows because Apple bypassed the GDI Windows graphics subsystem.

Microsoft and Intel were both shocked to find that Apple could deliver smooth video on the PC that was beyond what either company had imagined to be possible. When Microsoft requested a free license for QuickTime for Windows in 1993, Apple refused.

Meanwhile, Intel wanted to accelerate Microsoft's Video for Windows in hardware. It approached Apple's partner Canyon to develop a video driver that would provide similar performance to QuickTime.

While knowing that Canyon possessed Apple's code, Intel did not specify that Canyon needed to do clean room development, and gave the company an unrealistically short timeframe to develop the code.

As expected, Canyon simply delivered Apple's code to Intel, which then licensed it to Microsoft. When Video for Windows suddenly improved in 1994, Apple investigated and found that Microsoft had simply stolen code from QuickTime in order to compete with QuickTime.

Apple sued and won an injunction that stopped Microsoft from distributing portions of the stolen code, and the case was eventually resolved as part of the 1997 agreement between the two companies."

Going to the Apple partner that had the Apple source code and ending up with it was not legitimate Windows innovation.

Apple did considerable development beyond what they bought. And they didn't steal anything. Apple did offer to license the disputed technology to Samsung, and has always been willing to pay the basic industry standard rates for glue technology.

The anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft was very damaging to Netscape, Apple, and many others. It is fortunate that Apple recovered. Many others didn't.

This Harvard writer doesn't seem to be very insightful or even well informed. It also seems that many coming out of business school are severely lacking ethics.One thing is for sure, it wasn't business school types that made Apple successful.Is this another MS paid blogger? One was exposed posting pro MS revisionist history to the IEEE. It looks like we're being flooded with corporate "free speech".

Meanwhile, pet rocks on Earth are nervous. Hopefully this won't stir religious conflicts on Earth involving those who believe the spirits of their ancestors live in rocks.

Curiosity will also be giving us data on energetic protons from solar events. Since Mars has essentially no magnetic field, much lower energy particles can reach ground level than on Earth. Measurements were made on the way there. From the background levels, it looks like about half makes it through the Martian atmosphere.Studying solar weather on Mars may provide some insights as to what to expect when our magnetic field at home weakens. It's dropped 10% or so in the last 150 years which is a relatively fast rate of change.

The article and title here are very misleading since they actually refer only to power production, not overall CO2...

While gas has advantages over coal, there are serious issues with fracking.

âoeThe oil and gas industry is a significant source of VOCs, which contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone (smog),â said the EPA in announcing new rules for drilling issued this April. The EPA said methaneâ"what natural gas is made ofâ"is a highly potent greenhouse gas. The agency blames oil and gas production and processing for âoenearly 40% of all U.S. methane emissions.â

As with what's happening with corporate "free speech", money/stock may be an influence elsewhere. The study showing that it was toxic waste fluid injection wells causing contamination, not fracking itself, came from someone who received over 1.5 million in salary/stock (and didn't disclose that either).Even stranger, he was a senior official at the USGS, which instead of showing their own studies on fracking related quakes, linked to a similar outside study. There are many brilliant people at the USGS that don't deserve reputations being soiled by a key player.

Legitimate science isn't about simple majority opinion or Democracy. There's scientific method with peer review applying critical thinking. That requires open-mindedness. Separation of church and state should protect us from populist "intellectual hooliganism".

False science and false history of intent of our government forefathers go hand in hand.

These sorts of attacks go well beyond an inconvenience on a desktop, potentially affecting physical operations. It seems like the media doesn't know enough to dig deeper when something goes wrong.

Examples of media not doing investigative journalism:No reports that I could find mentioned the possiblity of a cyber event, or solar flares and the arriving CME as possibly affecting power in India recently. They were quick to blame capacity, even though the initial outage struck at about 2 AM, which is not at peak demand.

If they really want to make waves with free, the devices should include a free low-bandwidth net access package. Google owns or has contracted for enough fiber that they could probably do that in many places. With income from a store function, Amazon probably could too.

Really free VoIP seems no more far fetched than the free (ad supported) PCs or net access of 20 years ago. Wasn't NetZero one of those?

Some of that television spectrum taken from us should have been made available to support free or nearly free services.

(reminder to self: look up subsidies AT&T and others are getting for rural broadband)

Yes, it seems the closer one looks, the more there is to find with dirty deeds in the banking industry. And it's not just what has been done, but the scale of it.

"In 2010, Wachovia, now owned by Wells Fargo, settled out of court for the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act in US history. They paid a fine of $160m for laundering a whopping $378.4bn from Mexican currency exchange houses between 2004 and 2007. Much of this cash is thought to have been drug money, moved without proper documentation from Casa's de Cambio in Mexico to US banks. "

What would Aldous Huxley say about all this? It's interesting to look at what some said over half a century ago.

On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

They could stick with the spirit of Mojave by using the name of nearby Llano Del Rio.Since Windows 8 is a Brave New World for MS, it is fitting that the author of the book by that title, Aldous Huxley, once lived there. There is no feeling of that big-city Metro crowding.

yeah? Maybe they'd notice if everyone here called up Verizon, asked about this, and gave an informed opinion. Some people might switch to other carriers, or some looking for one might avoid them. If that's the case, be sure to tell them why they're losing your business, so they are fully aware of the opportunity to improve.

Responsiveness varies depending on who you talk to, so it is possible it would be worth calling more than once.

Since they're regulated by government agencies, feedback to those is appropriate too.

In a strange twist, radiation from cold-war era atomic testing in the South Pacific about half a century ago is responsible for those Japanese monster movies. They were inspired by fishermen returning home with severe radiation sickness, following exposure during a test.

So it isn't just the current butterflies resulting from release of radiation. The movie monster characters did too.

Then there was the Lost in Space episode, "The Great Vegetable Rebellion".(on Hulu?)

As the Robinsons celebrate the Robot's birthday, Dr. Smith sneaks off in the space pod to a planet dominated by plants. After pulling a flower, he is accused of murder by Tybo, a carrot-man, who punishes him to an eternity of literal tree-hugging. The family lands to search for Smith and meets a purple-haired botanist named Willoughby who explains that Tybo is the one in charge. After Smith is transformed into a talking stalk of celery, and Penny grows into a flower bed, the Professor and Major West try sabotaging Tybo's moisture-control system to stop the plant tyrant.